Sinatra

by James Kaplan

  Frank had called to console her as soon as he heard about the accident. Then, in December, Ava decided to fly to New York to consult with a plastic surgeon Sinatra had recommended. Not long after his birthday party at Villa Capri, and a few days after squiring his steady date Betty Bacall to Mocambo to dine with the David Nivens, Frank flew east to see his ex-wife. Bacall was not pleased.

  9

  Here goes, baby, here goes,

  Every worry, every fear goes,

  Every dull day in the year goes,

  I’m about to fall in love.

  —“HERE GOES,” SONGWRITER UNKNOWN

  Six days into the New Year, on the same day Come Fly with Me was released, the New York Times ran a piece about the seismic changes occurring in the movie industry. The article recalled the benevolent despotism of the studio system, under which actors, directors, and writers had been signed to long-term—usually seven-year—contracts and in return had had to take whatever projects the studio assigned, and otherwise do the studio’s bidding (there was the infamous MGM morals clause, for example) or risk suspension.

  “Today,” the Times’s Thomas M. Pryor wrote, “most stars and other movie creators no longer do business as individuals but as corporations.” High personal income tax rates, Pryor wrote, were responsible for the change. In those less wealth-friendly days in America, an individual was subject to income taxes as high as 92 percent. Corporate taxes, on the other hand, could not exceed 52 percent. An individual who incorporated could pay him- or herself a nominal salary and take a far smaller tax hit. As examples, the piece listed such “incorporated stars” as Burt Lancaster, John Wayne, Kirk Douglas, Alan Ladd, Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, Jerry Lewis, Gregory Peck, and Frank Sinatra. (Women were notably absent from the roster.) These stars “are in many respects big business,” Pryor said.

  They employ anywhere from a handful to several dozen persons, regularly or part-time, and their corporate gross earnings can run into several million dollars a year. It is estimated that Mr. Sinatra, as an artist–business man, currently has a gross annual income from movies, records and television of about $4,000,000.

  Interestingly, the article failed to mention—perhaps because precise accounting figures would have been hard to track down—another income stream for Frank: the Sands Hotel and Casino.

  Four years earlier, when Sinatra had been down on his luck, Joseph “Doc” Stacher, the lieutenant of the New Jersey crime boss Abner “Longy” Zwillman and one of the masterminds behind the national merger of the Mafia and the Jewish Mob, had fronted Frank $54,000 to buy two points in the Sands, then less than a year old. The idea of listing Frank as a shareholder was attractive for all kinds of reasons, chief among them his drawing power (an exclusive performance contract was part of the deal) and lack of a criminal record. That Mob figures were the true owners behind the Vegas casinos was still unproved at the time but strongly suspected by government and law enforcement. But the Nevada Tax Commission, smelling an eastern rat, had vigorously challenged Sinatra’s fitness to be a part owner, citing the significant back taxes he then owed the IRS and wondering how he could afford the $54,000.

  Then, for whatever reason, the commission suddenly caved, and Frank got his gaming license and his two points in the Sands.

  In the years since, his stake had risen to 4 percent, and by the beginning of 1958, through the munificence of the owners—some say a gift from the mobster Vincent “Jimmy Blue Eyes” Alo—Sinatra owned nine points in the Sands Hotel and Casino.

  What, exactly, did this mean?

  Not a tremendous amount, according to Ed Walters, a pit boss at the Sands from 1959 to 1967 and a friend and confidant of Sinatra’s. “Frank got paid—not as much as people think, but he got paid and he got all the money,” Walters claimed. “He was not fronting for anybody. He got paid a check, every month—no cash, ever. He did not want to wind up in front of the FBI.”

  Walters said that Frank was paid separately—also by check—for performing in the Copa Room. “I know some guys we paid false checks to for entertaining—not Sinatra,” the former pit boss recalled. “Frank was always worried about the Mob getting him in trouble. He used to tell me, ‘These assholes are all gonna go to jail.’ He was caught between wanting to be one of them and [his fear of legal entanglements]. So he cleverly had his lawyers do the speaking for him. Frank was a very astute businessman.”

  The myth has arisen that Frank Sinatra’s unfortunate reverence for the Mafia—“I would rather be a don for the Mafia than president of the United States,” he once told Eddie Fisher—meant that he was all but a made man. In fact, while his mother’s north Jersey connections had helped get him a couple of singing jobs early in his career, and a few of his wiseguy friends steered some work his way during his down period (but only some; not enough to turn his fortunes around), Sinatra’s Mob associations had far more to do with mutual admiration than affiliation. The gangsters liked his singing, his flash, and (at times) his unrepentant unruliness; he liked their power, their toughness, their swaggering style. Growing up in an era when power was largely in the hands of white Protestant men, a time when Italian-Americans were just a half step up the social ladder from African-Americans—and, like black people, were seen as simple, happy, and musical—Frank viewed the Mafia as a kind of unelected elect, an alternate aristocracy. He idolized them all his life, much as a small boy might idolize cowboys or soldiers.

  “By the thirties and forties, when Dad was in the business, they were controlling the nightclubs,” Tina Sinatra told Seymour Hersh.

  They were controlling the entertainment world. They were a motivated bunch. The power of an entertainer and the power of a mobster—it’s all very much a part of America. They were all from the same neighborhoods. My dad grew up with gangsters next door. He was living with them. They were his personal friends, and he’s not going to cast away a friend. The great vein through Frank Sinatra is loyalty. There is an absolute commitment to friends and family. It’s very Italian and probably gave him a little more in common with the mob types.

  For their part, the Mob tolerated him, now and then found him useful, sometimes threw him a bone. His New Jersey godfather Willie Moretti—who was much more like a gabby, tubby, slightly hovering uncle than a criminal mastermind—might have intervened when Sinatra was arrested for adultery and seduction (when those statutes were still on the books) in 1938. He tut-tutted by telegram when Frank left his first wife, Nancy, for Ava Gardner. Then he got rubbed out in 1951, perhaps for being too forthcoming with the Kefauver Committee, probably also for welshing on sports bets. The etiology of Mob executions is rarely unmixed.

  A couple of years later, Frank met Sam Giancana.

  Giancana, born in 1908, began his criminal career in a Chicago street gang and soon graduated from small-time mayhem to getaway driving, extortion, and murder for the Chicago Outfit—a group whose bosses, after Al Capone was imprisoned in the early 1930s, were Frank “the Enforcer” Nitti, Paul “the Waiter” Ricca, and Tony “Joe Batters” Accardo. After the death of Nitti and the semiretirement of Accardo in the 1940s, Giancana, nicknamed Momo or Mooney, became a boss himself.

  He was not a physically impressive man. He was small and big-nosed, with close-set eyes—weasel-featured. He wore large, dark-rimmed spectacles and a fedora to cover his bald pate. George Jacobs recalled that the mobster had “a high, almost girlish voice that mispronounced half of the few things he would say. He got everybody’s name wrong, from President Eisenheimer to Clark Grable.” Though he was always elegantly turned out in silk suits and neckties, and his hands were beautifully manicured, Giancana’s general aspect was “mousey,” according to Jacobs. He “looked dazed, lost, a scared rabbit…He seemed totally paranoid.” In his line of work, of course, paranoia amounted to a survival skill.

  To some, Giancana seemed bland to the point of invisibility. Those he wanted to impress, however, could be impressed by him. “I thought he was a very nice man,” the actor Robert Wagner recalled. �
�I had a very good time with him.” Many women, too, found the Mob boss appealing. “He really was a sweet guy,” remembered the nightclub singer Betsy Duncan Hammes. “Respectful and charming, with good manners.”

  But the veneer of politesse could give way very quickly to the sadistic thug beneath. “He could give you a look that was second to none,” an associate remembered. “A killer look.” “He had a look about him that scared me,” said Sammy Cahn’s first wife, Gloria Franks. “I didn’t want to be around him.” She recalled an incident at a party in Frank Sinatra’s Sands suite in the late 1950s: as a prank, Giancana unscrewed a hot lightbulb and applied it to the chest of Jimmy Van Heusen, who was reclining drunkenly on a sofa. “I thought, ‘My God, this man is a monster,’ ” Franks said. “He was a monster.”

  The unremarkable-looking Chicago Mob boss Sam Giancana was actually a cold-eyed killer. His friendship with Sinatra was a strange dance between two men, both determined to lead. (Credit 9.1)

  Sinatra would later claim, in sworn testimony to the Nevada Gaming Control Board, that he hadn’t made Giancana’s acquaintance until 1960 and that even then they had only had a superficial relationship. But in fact, the two men first met in the early 1950s through the New Jersey gangster Angelo “Gyp” DeCarlo, an avuncular executioner who had helped get Frank work in the early days. Frank sang at a charity event organized by Giancana’s wife in 1953, and the following year, according to Giancana’s daughter Antoinette, Sinatra and her father embraced affectionately when they met privately. At some point in the mid-1950s, Frank gave Giancana a star sapphire pinkie ring as a gesture of friendship. The mobster wore it proudly but, significantly, did not give Sinatra a ring in return.

  Two years after that embrace, according to George Jacobs, Giancana paid an epochal visit to Frank at the singer’s house in Palm Springs. Sinatra might as well have been welcoming a president. “He even hired a mariachi band to entertain,” Jacobs wrote, remembering his boss’s obsessive concern that everything in the house, from the linens to the soap to the Iranian beluga caviar, be perfect for the distinguished visitor.

  According to the valet, Frank was all meek deference during Giancana’s stay, following the mobster around the golf course as he—not Sinatra—played, hanging on his every word. The main topic of discussion was the casino business, Jacobs said, with Giancana the learned lecturer on all the crooked ins and outs and Frank, the upward-aspiring Sands shareholder, the eager student.

  And yet, by Ed Walters’s account, when it came to the casino business, Frank was more spectator than participant. Or rather more labor than management. He might have owned nine points in the Sands, but in an enterprise with a steady volume in the hundreds of thousands, if not the millions, Sinatra’s allegedly nominal monthly check would have reflected a basic disparity that can only be accounted for by one of the terms Giancana dazzled him with: the skim.

  The Mob’s involvement in Vegas left the realm of rumor after the May 1957 assassination attempt against the crime chieftain Frank Costello in New York. When a dazed and bloody Costello arrived at a hospital emergency room (the .38 slug fired by the Genovese family hit man Vincent “the Chin” Gigante had creased the Mob boss’s scalp but not entered his skull), detectives went through his pockets and found a wad of cash and a crumpled piece of paper. The paper read, “Gross Casino wins as of 4-26-57 $651,284. Casino wins less markers [Vegas-speak for IOUs] $435,695. Slot wins $62,855. Markers, $153,745. Mike $150 per week. Jake $100 per week. L. $30,000. H. $9,000.”

  That $651,284, as it turned out, was the exact amount the newly opened Tropicana casino in Las Vegas had taken in during its first twenty-four days of operation.

  Costello was sentenced to thirty days in jail for refusing to cooperate with a grand jury investigating his shooting. “At least part of the reason for his refusal, he indicated, was the Bureau of Internal Revenue, a number one bugaboo for gamblers,” the United Press reported.

  The Feds had long been trying to figure out how to accurately tax gamblers and gambling casinos, and gamblers and gambling casinos had worked assiduously, for just as long, to avoid paying taxes. As the brilliant opening sequence of Martin Scorsese’s Casino shows, the economy of Las Vegas gambling establishments in the days before the corporations took over the town was cash based, rigorously controlled by management, and subject to regular—routinized—depredations by the casino’s true owners, the bosses of organized crime. These periodic withdrawals were known as the skim. The existence of the skim was finally proven by that Rosetta stone, the crumpled note in Frank Costello’s pocket.

  But greed was always a problem where the Mob was concerned; it had been the tragic flaw of Bugsy Siegel’s Flamingo, the defining hotel-casino of Vegas’s post–World War II renaissance. Siegel had skimmed the Flamingo for all it was worth and then some; the result was his elimination. And so when it came to the Sands, the Mob decided to keep things on the square, in organized-crime terms. To share the wealth. The true ownership of the Sands was a purposefully complex affair—more complicated than the title to the Tropicana or, for that matter, any other casino in Vegas. “Pieces of the hotel were secretly held in New York, New Jersey, Chicago, Boston, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Texas, St. Louis—just about anyplace there was a group of gangsters worthy of the name,” writes Rat Pack chronicler Shawn Levy. “If the other Strip hotels were like little mom-and-pops run by the various out-of-state mobs in competition with one another, the Sands was owned by a syndicate so egalitarian in its ownership as to be tantamount to an honest-to-pete corporation.”

  Never had organized crime been so organized. Vegas was a gold mine, and nobody in the Mob wanted to roil the river of revenue. Gambling had only been legal in Nevada since 1931: legislators were sensitive to public opinion; therefore gangsters had to be sensitive to the legislators. The sheriff of Clark County was an all-powerful figure. “If mob figures in Las Vegas behaved as they did in other cities, where bloody factional fighting was common, reform-minded Nevadans might once again have outlawed gambling,” a labor history of the city asserts.

  But men like Meyer Lansky [a part owner of the Sands] knew the importance of appeasing the local electorate and insisted on keeping the city a relatively pleasant place to live. Las Vegas was what one former police officer called an “open city,” where warring factions from across the country shared in the gambling industry’s profits. “This was not the mob that had terrorized the cities of the East,” the officer explained. “This was the mob on its best behavior. This was a mob that was careful to offend no one among the townspeople, and in fact, made every effort to endear itself to the population.” If mobsters wanted to kill someone, they normally waited until the person was away from Las Vegas, as the case of “Bugsy” Siegel [who was executed at home in Los Angeles] reveals.

  From the day of its opening in December 1952, the Sands was state-of-the-art, commercially and aesthetically. The Los Angeles architect Wayne McAllister, a pioneer of the Googie style—a free-form, Jetsons-esque aesthetic that reflected the new space age—had designed the place to transcend his earlier creations, the more rustic El Rancho Vegas and the Desert Inn. The Sands’ main building, a low, strikingly spare pueblo-modern structure in red sandstone, fronted the sixty-five-acre plot; in back, ten low-slung outbuildings containing guest apartments and named after racetracks (Arlington Park, Belmont Park, Santa Anita, Aqueduct, and so on) surrounded the huge Paradise Pool. In front of the main building, alongside Highway 91, the two-lane blacktop that continued, as the Strip, into what was then the center of town, stood the hotel’s fifty-six-foot-high crowning glory, the Sands sign. All around was open desert.

  The sign, the background for the iconic 1960 Rat Pack photograph (Frank, Dean, Sammy, Peter Lawford, and Joey Bishop standing and squinting raffishly into the late-afternoon light), was the tallest sign on the Strip when it was built, a five-story blare of self-importance. The hotel’s name, in upward-angled, lightbulbed script, its giant initial S like a great wanton ribbon, was a de
claration that the gambler looking for action need look no further: here was the place of places, the joint of joints. Beneath the hotel’s name, in smaller caps, the clever slogan “A PLACE IN THE SUN” seemed to promise that the fates would be kind. Title and slogan rested above a great marquee that listed the showroom acts, and a lesser one, showing who was playing the lounge.

  McAllister had devoted equally great care to the hotel’s interior, whose elegant wood surfaces and muted lighting contrasted sharply with the glaring lighting and shiny surfaces inside other casinos. The 450-seat Copa Room, just off the casino, featured a dramatic Brazilian carnival motif and an open stage. The showroom, like its New York namesake, offered an extensive Chinese menu, and the food was said to be among the best on the Strip.

  “But it wasn’t the facilities that would make the Sands the ‘in’ spot for Texas high rollers and New York and Hollywood sophisticates,” writes the William Morris Agency historian Frank Rose. “It was Jack Entratter and the people he knew.”

  The Sands’ way-behind-the-scenes owners had made a brilliant move by persuading the Copacabana’s general manager to move west and run their hotel-casino. Jack Entratter, once the bouncer at the Stork Club, was a big, tough bear of a man with a bad foot (the result of a childhood case of osteomyelitis) and a disposition at once warm, formidable, and politically canny. He knew how to work with the Mob: Frank Costello was the Copa’s real owner, and the club’s on-site boss, Jules Podell, was said to be connected.